Final Frontier is Iron Maiden’s fifteenth (!) album, arriving in the band’s thirty-fifth year as one of the founding fathers of heavy metal. After writing song after song on historical battles, figures, and stories, this album marks a slightly new direction for the band: This isn’t War Album, or Ancient War Album, or even Time Travel War Album. This is Nuclear Space War Album.
We are reminded right off the bat, with Satellite 15’s thundering, nearly five minute introduction that Iron Maiden is back, and they are not fucking around. This is going to be an hour and fifteen minutes of the most balls-to-the-wall rock that these six British men can possibly come up with. No significant studio trickery here, either: If it’s not a noise that a guitar can make, then they probably don’t care about it.
You will not find a more straightforward metal album than this. Chugging riffs and belted, ominous lyrics, the occasional perplexing song about peace and unity (Coming Home) that never feels quite right coming from a band that’s always singing about the apocalypse and giving graphic descriptions of death and battle, but I can see how that would get boring.
The songs on this album are a showcase of what these men have learned over the last thirty-five years, which is mostly that they really, really like heavy metal. And they like it the way they play it. Both lyrically and musically, this stuff fits comfortably in with any of their other work and, where Iron Maiden has refused to expand and explore other styles of music they have in turn become better and better at making this brand of music.
Most readily apparent is, after all these years and all these albums, and while these guys have done nearly all there is to do within the rather limiting New Wave of British Heavy Metal genre, they’re not coasting on success and endlessly touring with the same material. And while their music feels at home in the 80’s, it manages to not feel stuck there, as here and there you will hear a melody or riff straight out of contemporary radio rock. The first couple minutes, and chorus of, Starblind is a good place to go hunting for this.
But it’s the final two songs on the album that really make it for me, The Man Who Would Be King, and When the Wild Wind Blows. King is a powerful and straightforward trip down E major avenue, with no surprise key changes or augmentations lying in wait to disrupt the power chord groove.
Wild Wind is a fantastic song for several reasons: Dickinson finally decides to, however briefly, use his voice in something that can not be described as ‘very intense’. The basis for the song is a folky, almost Irish ditty which is nicely mirrored throughout the verses between the vocals and guitar. And the solo, which makes up the balance of the track’s 11 minute length is a carefully constructed miniature symphony, Maiden putting down their riff machine gun in favor of thematic variation that lends itself very nicely to the original melody, which echoes here and there throughout the entire piece.
If you’re a fan of Iron Maiden, you will definitely like this album. Partly because it’s metal, partly because it’s Maiden, but mostly because it properly sounds like Iron Maiden. The lead single, El Dorado, is essentially The Trooper but redone and dressed up a bit. They know what their fans want and love, and they love it just as much, and are very much above phoning in a so-so record with a few weedlies here and there. Final Frontier is a quality product, and an anomaly in that here we have a tried-and-tested group of musicians who are still making and kicking ass at the very same thing they were doing over a quarter of a century ago.
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